However dramatic the Bombers' exit may be on Saturday night against Richmond at the MCG, however angry they are and whoever they may blame, the fact remains their football club has tarnished a football season like no club before it.

And now the game's supporters will get their game back - bruised, not a little damaged and far from healed, but the game nonetheless. This weekend the only results that count are the on-field results. Mathematically five teams are playing for a place in the final eight and four of those take the field on what has emerged from the legal thicket of recent days as Super Saturday.

The Essendon chapter has not been completely closed. The players have not yet been cleared by the anti-doping authorities, club doctor Bruce Reid still stands charged with conduct unbecoming and could yet face an open hearing wherein players could be called to give some uncomfortable evidence.

The prospect of legal action from players and WorkSafe Victoria still looms and surely James Hird remains no certainty to take back his job on the eve of the finals next year for all of the above reasons. As it stands, Essendon has no coach, no football department chief, an interim CEO, a board that should be ashamed of its club's operational failures and an inexperienced chairman. The emotional and physical clean-up operation is as daunting as ever faced by a club in this competition.

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Saturday night at the MCG, Essendon's supporters have one last chance to acknowledge the efforts of their team throughout 2013. For them, the game counts for nothing on the scoreboard of the season but - for one more night - everything symbolically. For them, an on-field victory will be read by the most fanatical as a win over Andrew Demetriou and the AFL.

For the first time a team will enter a home-and-away clash for no points, which will relegate the MCG clash to a significant place in AFL history. In another historic event, AAMI Stadium stages its final AFL game in a match that will play a big part in shaping the final eight. If Richmond's journey to the finals seems long overdue, Port Adelaide's shows that not all performances are dictated by the so-called premiership clock. Port remains football's 2013 fairytale swamped by the Shakespearean tragedy that unfolded at Windy Hill.

And as Hird and his courtiers enter their exiled season of discontent, Carlton coach Mick Malthouse just gets grumpier. Incredibly, the Blues, who have done everything possible to miss the eight, need only to defeat Port on Saturday to play finals and potentially next week at the MCG against Richmond. Should Carlton lose, the door will open for North Melbourne, which could be rewarded for all those heartbreakingly narrow defeats.

The Essendon-Richmond game has been described as a dead rubber but for the Tigers it is far from that. Richmond must win to retain fifth position and atone for what many at the club regard as its worst performance all season - the Dreamtime clash against the Bombers.

Some Essendon conspiracy theorists claim the AFL has orchestrated the Bombers' final curtain as a one-off dead game. But whether the competition's governing body cynically stage-managed ''Super Saturday'', the eve of the 2013 spring will hopefully be remembered as the day football mattered again.

And when there were no lawyers, commissioners or spin doctors required. Just the coaches and players calling the shots.